In furniture production, it is often desirable to provide customers with furniture that a customer or installer can build from a furniture system made of various component parts. Such modular furniture systems permit customers or installers to purchase the furniture system at a lower cost than purchasing a fully assembled article of furniture or articles of furniture because the customer need not pay a manufacturer or designer the costs associated with fully assembling the various component parts of the furniture Examples of various types of modular furniture systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,877,824 to Winkless, U.S. Pat. No. 6,808,334 to Nicoletti, U.S. Pat. No. 6,883,878 to Gorelick, U.S. Pat. No. 7,014,267 to Nagar, and British Patent GB 2,337,557 to Mainiero.
Some modular furniture systems use similar component parts to construct one type of furniture. For example, Nagar discloses a system that utilizes a plurality of elongate bars and connectors for connecting the bars to one another to construct storage boxes. Mainiero discloses a connector system used to connect multiple screens or panels together. The connector system of Mainiero discloses connectors that have lugs with cup portions that fit within slots within adjacent screens or panels.
Other modular furniture systems are used to make various types of furniture from a set of parts. For instance, Nicoletti discloses a connecting system for modular furniture structures that includes carrier upright elements to which complementary structural members are attached. The structural members are attached to the carrier upright element by connecting means, which include anchors and pin rods attached to the carrier upright element and the structural members.
Such modular systems typically fail to provide a user or installer a way of easily altering the structure of the built furniture to address new furniture needs that may arise For example, many of these systems normally do not provide furniture that has easily rearranged or replaced components.
A modular furniture system is needed that permits purchasers of such systems to easily rearrange furniture built from the components of the system to meet new furniture needs that may arise.